The Earth is wanting the large meteor storm

Stacked picture of 2018 draconids recorded by Tioga Gulon from his station of Fléville (East of France).

On October eight and 9, European sky observers had been amazed when a wave of meteors flooded the sky at midnight. It was an explosion of the annual Draconid meteor bathe. It seems that this explosion was solely the seen a part of the iceberg. Laptop fashions present that Earth has simply missed two streams of comet particles that will have precipitated extreme meteor storms if that they had crossed our planet. These findings are based mostly on a pc mannequin of the particles discipline from the comet of the Meteor Physics group on the College of Western Ontario. Right here she is exhibiting the Earth digging the hole between two filaments of comet mud:

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It might have been 10 occasions extra spectacular. The truth is, the Earth narrowly prevented a meteor storm.

The European explosion happens when the Earth bypasses a filament of particles from comet 21P / Giacobini-Zinner. If this filament had moved in our route of solely zero.005 AU (about 500 000 miles), the Earth would have skilled a worldwide storm of greater than 1 000 meteors per hour.